SEAL Team 666

53

With Yaya’s arm set in a makeshift sling and his wounds cleaned, they sat on one of the sofas inside the warehouse so that Yaya could relate the story. Besides a dislocated shoulder, he had a through-and-through in his calf and a bullet trail along the right side of his scalp.

“…then the ground gave way.” He wiped at his double-mashed mouth with a rag. “Must have been forty of them waiting. And don’t get me wrong, the ground was firm. They must have activated it from below. Pulled out a support or something.”

“It must have been hell with all the gunfire.”

Yaya knitted his brow and shook his head as the events came back to him. “You’d think so, right? I mean it was, at first. We were firing at everything that moved and there was a lot of movement, let me tell you. But…”

“But what?”

“We realized they weren’t aiming at us.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Walker asked incredulously.

“Just like I said. They weren’t shooting at us.”

“But you were shooting at them.”

“With everything we had. When my Super 90 ran out, I tried to climb out of the hole and draw my nine-mil.”

“I saw that. They came out after you.”

“And I popped them. What hit me by the way? A train?”

“Close. A five-ton crashed into the crates.”

Yaya sipped water from the side of his mouth, wincing as a cut came in contact with the canteen.

“Back to the firefight. Weren’t they shooting at you?”

Yaya shrugged. “I just don’t think so. Mind you, I was only paying attention to those in my line of fire, and I’m telling you, they weren’t firing at me.”

“Then what were they doing?”

“A lot of them were firing into the sky, but some were trying to coldcock me with their rifle.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Unless…” Walker’s eyes brightened as hope dawned in them. “Unless they didn’t want to kill you.”

“They wanted to capture us,” Yaya said as the possibility hit him as well. “Are you certain that the others are dead?”

“I thought I was. I would have never believed that the men in the hole weren’t trying to kill you. But now that that’s a possibility, maybe they’re alive. Maybe they’re just unconscious.”

“To what end?” Yaya wondered.

“No kidding. What are they going to do with them?”

“If Laws’s idea of Chi Long is at all accurate, they might be facing a demon even now.” Yaya turned to look at Walker. “You’ve seen demons before. You were possessed. What would it do?”

An image of himself chasing a cripple down the street with a bloody piece of metal slammed into his consciousness. It took a moment for him to shake it away. “I think this one is different. Mine was inside me. This one already has a host. A willing host if what we think about the skin suits is true,” he added. “My guess is that it could do pretty much anything it wanted.”

“And we have no idea where they are.”

“Hoover might.”

“That dog would chase them until it collapsed.” Yaya made a face as he thought about the loss of the dog. “It should have done better by me. Damn dog should have stayed in place.”

“I don’t know. I think maybe she did. She did what I would have done if I’d been able.”

“Well, unless Hoover comes back and somehow tells us where they are, it’s like finding a virgin in Patpong,” Yaya said solemnly.

“Know what they call a virgin in Patpong?” Walker asked.

“What?

“Oh, I thought you knew. I’ve never heard of one.”

“Very funny. Is that your way of telling me we don’t have a chance in hell of finding them or something?”

“Or something.”

“If only our coms worked. We need SPG and support more than ever now.”

“We could check the soldiers.” Remembering Yaya’s wounds, he hastily added, “I mean I could check them. We might be able to get something from their pocket trash. I’ll bring you what I find.” He gestured toward some of the boxes and containers along the walls. “Maybe there’s something in one of these you can use to fix the coms.”

Yaya stared morosely at the darkness, then hauled himself to his feet.

“Fine. You go check the dead and I’ll see what I can find here.”

Walker exited the building and began searching the bodies. They’d already started to smell. Offal and entrails were the worst. Neither were smells that should be outside the human body. Now, mixed with the humid Myanmar night, it created an olfactory cauldron from the bodies’ unexpected excrescence. The smell and feel of the corpses was something new to Walker. As he worked among the dead, he fought to keep his stomach from crawling all the way out.

He’d killed before. But the pirates had been over a mile away and he’d been too busy to deal with the aftermath of the deaths of the Chinese Triad enforcers. This was something different. It was truly a butcherous job to check all the pockets. He found a lot of packs of cigarettes along with lighters and matches, but no wallets or identification cards. Several times he found a slip of paper with writing on it, but without Laws’s facility with languages, he had no hope of knowing what they said. Still, he pocketed these in case he could use them later.

He found a strip of map on one soldier who had stars on his shoulder boards. Just a piece torn from something larger, but it showed a town on a coast, with the ocean to the west. Or was it the east? He turned the page upside down. It had Chinese characters, and remembering the shape of the characters Laws had showed them helped him determine which direction. He turned it back around so that the ocean was on the west. Here and there Xs had been made. What looked like a sporting field of some sort had been circled several times.

The sky was brightening by the time he climbed out of the hole. When he stood on the edge, he gratefully inhaled the clean air. As if the oxygen was capable of increasing his awareness, a thought came to him.

He hurried inside. He found Yaya on the floor amid a pile of odd cables and electronic parts. He held up a shredded wire and gave it a look of sheer disgust.

“They’re coming back,” Walker said with a certainty.

Yaya looked up. “Who’s coming back?”

“The soldiers. They didn’t finish their cleanup. And my guess is that they’ll be looking for you. I think you got lost in their rush to remove the others.”

Yaya’s expression went from concerned to thoughtful. “If they come back, then we have a chance to find the others.”

Walker nodded. “Exactly. And we need to be ready.” He pointed toward the pile of electronics. “Any luck with those?”

“I don’t even think the love child of Jules Verne and Guglielmo Marconi could make sense of these. Some of these cables come from World War Two.” He tossed one aside and got to his feet. His legs were wobbly. “With any luck they’ll bring back the MBITRs all fixed, shiny, and like new.”

“Yeah, just don’t hold your breath.”